


Soul Meets Body

by isaacedlahey



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Love Confessions, Love/Hate, basically it's just cora and lydia being their adorably fierce and somewhat terrifying selves, i have no idea what the heck i'm doing with these tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 03:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacedlahey/pseuds/isaacedlahey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"They stay like that for awhile, the sole Martin and the youngest Hale, clutching each other in the middle of a dirty loft, red hair spilling across black, combat boots scuffing the edges of hot pink heels."</em>
</p><p>Cora is everything that Lydia shouldn't want. Lydia is everything Cora hates. And yet.</p><p>Or, the story of how snarls turned to smiles and smirks to kisses in the pale moonlight of the loft.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soul Meets Body

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at 3 in the morning, so whatever horror you are about to read is entirely...well, entirely my fault. But blame sleeplessness too. I was just reeling from the Cordia in the finale, and...this happened.
> 
> Title taken from the Death Cab for Cutie song "Soul Meets Body". Also, I know Lydia's eyes are not bright green. However, just imagine, for the duration of this fic, that they are.

Cora hates Lydia Martin.

She hates every flaming red hair on her head (the color of fire; Cora can’t stand fire, she can’t look at flames without seeing her life burn). She despises every perfectly curled eyelash resting on her bright green eyes (the color of the trees in the woods; Cora doesn’t go into the woods anymore, she’s broken too many bones running in them). She loathes every follicle of her wide, expressive lips (always saying words Cora doesn’t want to hear; Cora won’t listen to her words, because the only words she trusts are the ones that make up the thoughts running through her head). 

She hates everything Lydia stands for, with her designer handbags and her raspy voice, always sounding like she’s just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. Who is this girl, this girl who walks in and screams and brings a pack of werewolves – _her_ pack – to their knees? Who is this _teenager_ with friends who believe they can change the world and still have time for manicures?

Who is Lydia Martin, and why does she get under Cora’s skin like a parasitic disease, seeping through her pores like a cloud of the redhead’s Chanel No. 9? Who is Lydia Martin, and why should Cora care?

“Sweetheart,” Lydia drawls, and Cora _hates_ her pet names, hates how the Martin girl’s lips inhale sweet words and spit them back out covered in poison, so condescending, so all-knowing, so demeaning. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

Cora’s eyes flash to the weight that she’d been lifting and back up to stare at Lydia, eyebrows beginning to furrow, eyes on the verge of narrowing. “Excuse me?”

“Your technique,” the smaller girl says simply, propping herself back against Derek’s coffee table, high-heeled legs crossing over one another in her casual stance. “It’s not exercising your flexors and extensors to their full, unbridled potential.”

(Cora abhors Lydia’s big words, her textbook definitions, her brilliant mind and the gears that are constantly turning in it.)

“Why do you care?” Cora replies, rolling her eyes slightly (though she does shift the weight’s mass between fingers slightly, and doesn’t miss Lydia’s smirk). “Scratch that, why are you even _here_?”

Lydia shrugs. “I was bored.”

Cora just looks at her, waiting for the other girl to continue, but Lydia simply gazes right back, unblinking, smile frozen on her face. Cora, eyes watering, finally ends the staring contest with a huff, dropping her weight and turning away from the banshee girl, as purposeful and dignified as possible while dripping in sweat and wearing nothing but a sports bra and running shorts.

“Sure, stay, pull up a chair,” she mutters, grabbing a towel off of the ground to wipe the moisture pooling at her hairline. “Welcome to the Hale House for Wayward Werewolves, Human Vagabonds, and now, apparently, Rampant Banshees.”

Cora doesn’t have to look back to know Lydia is smiling.

(Cora hates Lydia’s smile, the way it lights up her whole face and glimmers in the sunlight. She hates the way her dimples stop exactly four-fifths of the way down her face, and she detests the fact that she took the time to measure.)

“Don’t you have, like, a shopping spree to go to? Super sale on Gucci perfume, or whatever?” Cora says gruffly, whirling around to face the redhead. Lydia’s eyebrows raise. 

“Chanel,” Lydia says simply. Cora blinks.

“What?”

“My perfume. It’s Chanel. Not Gucci. I’d never wear Gucci perfume.”

Cora pretends to digest the information. She pretends that she hadn’t already known, that she hadn’t been listening when Lydia had, one lazy summer day, informed the whole group of them exactly what she thought about each perfume brand, including the specifics of their ingredient list. She pretends that she isn’t riveted by everything Lydia Martin says.

Because she hates Lydia Martin. She hates her stupid, glossy mouth, and the way it curls upwards now, and she hates herself for thinking about it. 

“I don’t care,” she manages to choke out. “You think I give a fuck what perfume you wear, princess? You think I care about perfume at all?”

“No, I definitely don’t think that,” Lydia snorts. “Not when you smell like sweat and dirt all the time.”

Cora feels a bubbling of anger in her stomach, and this is good, she needed this, because anger towards Lydia is a familiar emotion, one she can grasp. Nothing like the complicated fluttering closer to her heart. “Maybe that’s because I’m trying to do something to help our situation instead of just laying down on my canopy bed and screaming whenever we find a body!” she snaps, allowing the frustration to wash over her.

(Cora hates the way Lydia blinks rapidly like she’s been slapped before steeling her face into a mask of marble. Cora hates that her stomach twists uncomfortably at the sight. She hates that she cares.)

“You think I haven’t been doing anything? You think this – all of this – isn’t exactly as hard on me as it is on you?” Lydia snarls, taking a step closer, heels leaving tracks on the dusty ground.

“I think you help when it’s convenient for you to help,” Cora says, but her voice is wavering now, because Lydia is very _close_ , surely she hadn’t been this close before. She forces herself to focus on the anger, and, as always, it envelops her, comforts her. “I think you’re a teenage girl who’s lived in paradise and is just now realizing people are drowning all around her.”

“And I think _you’re_ a bitter child who’s learning that her problems aren’t any worse than anyone else’s.”

“You’re a control freak. You’re a…a sex maniac!”

“You’re a little girl, a vagrant _wolf_!”

“You’re a fucking _banshee_ , and probably certifiably crazy!”

Lydia is very, very close. Her nose is almost touching Cora’s.

“Oh, I’m crazy all right,” the redhead says softly, a wicked grin stretching across her pale, poreless face. “I’m absolutely _nuts_.” 

And before Cora can really process what’s happening, the warm lips she’d never admit that she’d dreamt about are on hers, and they are softer than she’d ever imagined, softer than the coat of a wolf on its first full moon, softer than her mother’s hands holding her as an infant. Lydia’s slick lip gloss provides traction, and Cora’s mouth is sliding and falling, and _Cora_ is falling, and her heart is dropping and thumping and nothing else exists but this moment. 

A lycanthrope and a banshee with the heart of a wolf. She’ll never hear the end of this one. 

(She hates that she knows it’s worth it.)

When Lydia pulls away, her normally animated and masked face is unguarded, and Cora sees it in her eyes, all of it. The fear, the pain, the hope, and the promise of _something_ , shimmering in her pupils, great and terrible in all its depths. 

The redheaded girl holds her hand out to the young Hale. It’s an offer. 

(Cora hates that she already knows her choice, has known it for months.)

She nestles her hand into the palm of Lydia’s and twines their fingers together, admiring the contrast of their skin, callused and smooth intermingling as one.

“You know,” Lydia says softly, her voice sounding close to laughter and a hundred other emotions at once, “I’ve always kind of liked the smell of sweat and dirt.”

And Cora rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning, and Lydia’s eyes sparkle at the sight. They stay like that for awhile, the sole Martin and the youngest Hale, clutching each other in the middle of a dirty loft, red hair spilling across black, combat boots scuffing the edges of hot pink heels.

Cora hates the world outside the loft. She hates the cruelty and the pain, the suffering and the misery. She hates Deucalion, and Peter, and Derek some days. She hates her own powerlessness, and she hates the petite size of her muscles in comparison to her brothers’. Cora even hates herself on the especially lonely nights, when the moon seems too small and the world feels like it’s too large for her to canvas.

But the small redhead she now clings to is like something out of a fairy tale, if Rapunzel climbed down her own tower and had hair the color of strawberries. She smells like springtime, Talia’s favorite time of the year. She is tiny and fierce and she makes Cora believe that something better is out there, waiting for her.

Cora hates many things. She hates the greenness of the leaves in the woods. She hates the smell of skunks. She hates miniskirts, the color orange, and silver bullets. 

She tried to hate Lydia Martin.

But as she reaches down to kiss her again, she realizes that it was never possible. Cora doesn’t hate Lydia. Not even a little. 

Outside, the sun begins to set and the moon rises. A day is ending, Cora thinks. And then a thought strikes her, born out of the warmth in her veins.

_A new day is beginning._

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://isaacedlahey.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
